Sliced motorcyclists

The Spanish are doing really well at cutting the number of accidents on the roads. In the last 5 years road deaths have dropped about 46% though that still means 2181 people were torn apart on the roads. More people died in the UK in the same year, 2538, but as the population of Spain is some 44 million and the UK about 61 million then you have more chance of staying alive in Dagenham than in Mostoles.

A disproportionate number of motorcyclists die though. In fact until 2007 whilst motorist deaths were dropping steadily bike deaths were going through the roof. Last year, for the first time, the number of dead bikers dropped but it was still over 300.

The bikers of course blame a range of factors particularly car drivers for bumping into them. I must say that they always seem like a sober bunch of individuals to me and hardly any of them go too fast on monstrously powerful machines. And those young lads on the bikes in town, as well behaved as my Aunt Lizzie hoped I would be.

I was reminded of this because today, as I drove home, I noticed lots of shiny new lower rails on the "Armco" barriers on the road between Mahoya and Pinoso. Apparently when the bikers come off their bikes and slide across the road they get sliced into little pieces as they pass under the usual height barriers - hence the addition of the lower rail.

All Saint's Day

My usual November 1st post revolves around how lots of Spaniards make a day of visiting the family grave complete with scrubbing brushes and bunches of flowers.

This year we avoided any morbidity and headed for the fair at Cocentaina. Spain is quite good at themed market type fairs but there are certain staples for them all - crusty bread that costs 25€ per loaf, the people from Guijuelo with boxes of cooked and cured meats for just 40€, big yummy sweets made with real fruit juice that cost 5€ for four and mustard flower soap that costs 12€ for the smallest slab. See the theme?

This one seemed a bit different though. For a start it was huge. We didn't quite know what we were going to and as we approached the town there were cars parked all over the verges of the roundabout we used to come off the main road in that amazingly higgledy piggledy way that Spaniards have. No flower bed too small to park in. We presumed there must be something going on right there and tried to park up ourselves but being scaredy cat Brits we couldn't find anywhere. We did discover though that the mass parking went on and on and on. We eventually found some space in a field but by now we'd sort of gleaned that it was a big market type fair. There was another odd thing, by now it was about 2.30pm, well into eating time, the time when Spain slows to a crawl on any day and on Sunday, well like Wales in the 1950s, nothing opens. But this fair was definitely open.

The whole centre of the town was in use as the market place with different zones being used for different themes - the horse fair, rides and toys, local products, food, an Arab suq, an area selling agricultural machinery and biomass burning stoves plus, the tourism area, the environmental area and lots more. All the usual suspects were there but it was also very different and much, much bigger. I was really impressed with the food stalls and Maggie had to stop me buying a slurry spreader as we browsed the agricultural section. I took the name and address of the people who did the family sized olive presses though - pretty and useful I thought.

New for old

In June 2008 I mentioned this house as being an important HQ for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War.

Someone has been doing some work on it. With its new yellow finish it is quite difficult to tell that the house has any history at all - it looks nearly new.

I've just read that the last Republican Prime Minister, Negrin, fled Spain as the Republican forces admitted defeat in March 1939. Negrin left on 6 March and the last Republican cities, amongst them Cartagena, fell on 30 March. His departure airfield was the one next to this house.

The Shoe Museum

There's a shoe museum in Elda. It's not surprising; shoes were big business along the valley of the Vinalopó. They still are but, as you might imagine the industry has taken a battering from the Chinese.

There are often pieces in the local papers about Chinese firms based here importing shoes from China and then bunging them in boxes marked "Made in Spain" before shipping them all over Europe with names that sound Spanish or International. Stories about counterfeiting of branded shoes abound. Spanish workers regularly march around with banners or go in coachloads to Madrid and dump shoes in front of Government buildings.

Anyway, ther's a shoe museum in Elda. It's a big building, a modern and quite impressive building with interesting displays as I remembered and I hadn't been there for a while. So when I went to Elda to sign on yesterday I thought I'd have another look around.

I've been here in Spain a while now and lots of things that used to phase me no longer do. So, when I had to ring a bell to get into the museum I wasn't surprised. The bloke on the intercom said the door should be open, hang on he'd ring the woman on the information desk and get her to open the door. She came and opened the door.

"Yes, what do you want?"
"I'd like to have a look around the museum"
"Oh, right, come on in then"

I lounged on the counter looking through some leaflets whilst she shuffled some papers, looked around a bit and eventually picked up a walkie talkie.

"I need to find the caretaker to turn on the lights"
"Oh, if it's a bother I can go and get a coffee and come back in half an hour"
"That's not such a bad idea, why not do that?"

So I did and whilst I was having a coffee Maggie phoned me and set me a task that meant that I never got back to the shoe museum.

This is the night mail

One of the few poems I know is Auden's Night Mail - the one that has the clackety clack rhythm.

For we Brits mail and trains go together. Maybe it's no longer a reality (doesn't all the mail go by road or air nowadays?) but we old folk still talk about Mail Trains. I certainly expect a post box at a railway station.

So just now, when I went to collect Maggie from the train as she arrived in Petrer from Cartagena I took a couple of letters to post. A waste of time. Not a letter box in sight, not on the platform nor near the station nor even on the nearest main road. A whole culture to unlearn and relearn still.

Country living

I got back to Culebrón today and this bird was in our living room.

A quiet weekend

Really I have nothing to report. Well nothing in the way of an insight into Spain unless you want to read my stupendously insightful 500 words on street names in Spain as published in this month's TIM magazine. I think the article is on page 8, it's called 1066 and all that. Third article I've had printed in the magazine.

But I did want to make sure that you knew that Life in Culebrón was still alive. We were here for the weekend. It's been rather nice actually. Away from the hustle and bustle of Cartagena. Paradise for Edi the cat who has been able to get out of the house and slaughter all sorts of small lifeforms.

Last night we went, with some English pals, to take in one of the Moors and Christians parades in the nearby town of Crevillente. I wasn't looking forward to it all that much (seen one M&C seen 'em all) but we actually had quite a good evening. We even stopped for a beer on the way home in the town of Aspe. Sitting out at 11 in the evening with the temperature scraping the low 20s and with lots of life in the town square was rather nice. And, as Geoff pointed out, town on a Saturday night was open to every age from children through to pensioners.

It's raining, it's pouring

Get to Know Spain is a companion book for GCSE exams written by Rosemary Hunt and first published in 1980. In the section on climate it says - In most parts of Spain the climate is extremely harsh.

As I've said in another post we haven't seen much rain over the last two or three months but for the past couple of days the temperatures have dropped (27ºC daytime 15ºC overnight) and the sky has been threatening rain. And today it came. Buckets and buckets of the stuff.

As usual our interior patio started to fill with water and I had to wade out to unblock the drain, our next door neighbour is apparently, as I type, trying to stop the water flowing down our joint track from carving out a mini version of the Grand Cañon, our aljibe, the thing that collects run off water, is overflowing, we keep losing the electric for a few seconds after every lightning flash and we've unplugged all the computers from the mains just in case. The hail was bouncing off the cars and patio furniture whilst the thunder crashed and the lightning crackled. The cat doesn't seem too concerned by the celestial fireworks but he did come to join us - safety in numbers I suppose.

When it rains it's often like this and when the wind blows it destroys things. It hails a lot. And of course all summer long everyone goes around complaining about the heat. Extremely harsh seems a fair enough description Rosie!

I've always depended on the kindness of strangers

I was with a British pal yesterday as we went to the fruit and veg stalls in the town market. He had been charged, by his wife, to buy potatoes and tomatoes.

At the stall he pointed to the potatoes, showed five fingers and said kilos, he repeated the mime for the tomatoes (though with a different number of digits) and then held out a handful of small change from which the stall holder took the appropriate amount.

His wife mentioned that they have been living in Spain for six years.

A plague on both your houses

Back in Culebrón for the weekend and I noticed that there were a lot of small moths hanging on to the kitchen ceiling. Something similar happened a couple of years ago we had tens, if not hundreds, of moths inside the kitchen cupboard where we keep the dried goods.

Being murderous and ecologically unsound I set about them with the fly spray which worked to a degree in that the moths had soon gone. I forgot all about them but later Maggie noticed that there were grub like caterpillars undulating their way across our ceiling. Horrid.

Manual harvesting along with a thorough clean out of the flour and cereal cupboard seems to have done the trick for the moment.

Going, going, gone

We Brits have been running auctions at two spots around Pinoso for a while now - one at the Country Hotel, La Pinada and the other at Bonnie's Bar and Campsite.

We went along to Bonnie's as we were looking for things for the flat in Cartagena. My guess is that we will not be regular attenders.

Don't forget: with our weeks now split between Culebrón and Cartagena new posts will be on both sites.